Morning Glory: Kelly Ripa

Kelly Ripa was barely out of her twenties when she became Regis Philbin's work wife on his eponymous morning show 12 years ago. When he retired, she took the lead spot—and has more than proved that she can wear the pants in the family.

One early October morning in Manhattan, Kelly Ripa, the namesake star of TV's top-rated syndicated morning show, is sitting in a makeup chair in a small, brightly lit room on the Upper West Side, as she's done every weekday for the past 12 years. Around her, the show's makeup artist and hairstylist are working in tandem—moisturizing, curling, concealing, and lining. Ripa's preshow routine, relative to other morning TV hosts, is expeditious. She arrives at the studio at 8 A.M., and an hour later she's beamed into some 3 million households across the country.

This morning, she's wearing a knee-length black skirt with a violet pattern, a black tee, a gray cardigan, and stilettos. "I got dressed up for you," she says. "Normally I'm in the same outfit every day, black jeans and a T-shirt—actually, this T-shirt, so I didn't dress up that much. Sometimes I wear heels, because I happen to love heels, but if it's freezing cold or boiling hot, it could easily be an Ugg boot or a flip-flop." Ripa looks petite on TV, and no less so in person. "I'm exactly 64 inches, which I know from my life-insurance exam. When you're older and have children, you start thinking, What if something happens to me?" says the 42-year-old, erupting into a self-mocking giggle that she punctuates by slapping the arm of her chair. "I will say that it was the longest breast exam I've ever had," she adds. "I was just like, 'C'mon. I'm an A cup! This cannot go on this long!' "

And there it is: the one-two punch that Ripa employs to seduce and disarm not only her viewers, but also her celebrity guests. Having sized up her audience—in this case, me, a 28-year-old woman—she has, in a matter of minutes, made light of the discrepancies between us (her dressier outfit, my black jeans; our ages) and established common ground (we're both small, and small breasted). The flirtation is so seamless, so skillfully choreographed that, even though I've watched Ripa do it on TV for the past decade, I don't realize it happened until after I leave.

"A lot of people don't listen to the people they're talking to," says CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, who counts Ripa among his close friends. "But Kelly, she picks up on everything, and she makes fun of herself, which, in TV, not a lot of people can do in a genuine way." According to Michael Gelman, the show's executive producer for 25 years, "Kelly is very quick, very funny, very likable, and very self-deprecating. Everyone wants to be her best friend." That is, in fact, how Andy Cohen, an executive vice president at Bravo, felt even before the two met. "I think that's how everyone thinks of her," he says, "which is probably exhausting for her, just being in the universe."

Hair and makeup hour is also when producers brief Ripa about the day's program. Gelman, who's leaning on the mirrored makeup table, is holding a sheaf of news clippings. Live With Kelly and Michael occupies that realm of morning TV where wholly inoffensive, crowd-pleasing content is dispensed to viewers who are home after 9 A.M., and, if they're interested in hard news, have probably already found it elsewhere. Today, the weird-but-true headlines include the population explosion of squirrels in the Northeast, a naked man terrorizing hikers in Texas, and the endorsement of Barack Obama by seven-year-old reality-TV star Honey Boo Boo. A producer named Jan comes in to discuss the inflatable obstacle course that has been set up outside where Ripa and her newly anointed cohost, the former New York Giant Michael Strahan, will compete against the wife-carrying champions of the world, Taisto and Kristina.

Ripa gives me a deadpan look, before returning her attention to her producer.

Ripa's success, in a time when TV is filtered through the discerning, mocking eye of YouTube or Saturday Night Live, is due to a specific self-awareness about her medium. She simultaneously recognizes the entertainment value of a wife-carrying competition and the absurdity of it, always letting her audience know that she's in on the joke. That she manages to do this without appearing arrogant or embarrassed is perhaps why Ripa has been able to win over not just those looking for wholesome morning entertainment, but the culturally sophisticated, too. It's a tonal dexterity that confounds other hosts—in 2012, Ann Curry was ousted from Today after just a year as cohost for failing to connect with her audience—but one that seems to come easily to Ripa: She's a wife and mother of three who loves box wine, boardwalks, and Uggs, but she's also a SoHo resident who gets tattooed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; takes family vacations with Cooper (recently, to Croatia); and, as I will soon learn, can reference HBO's Girls without seeming affected. She is, in other words, a regular girl with an unexpected cool. That dichotomy, while maybe practiced, is not insincere—it's who she is.

Minutes before airtime, Live's stylist, Faith Cromas, helps Ripa change into a floral Rebecca Taylor dress with a nipped waist. On the show, Ripa favors colorful, playful pieces from designers such as Stella McCartney, Erdem, and Isabel Marant. "We try to keep with her personality—kind of flirty, kind of daytime," Cromas says. Ripa tells me that lately she's been receiving complaints from viewers who claim to be able to see her nipples through her clothes. "I've come out on the air and addressed it," she says. " 'You are not seeing nipples. Please do not send these letters!' And by the way, everybody has nipples. Let's all just calm down."

Out in the studio, mothers and daughters, as well as a handful of retirement-age men, have already taken their seats. Ripa and Strahan bound onto the stage to pumping music and dance in place before settling into their chairs. Next to me is a group of friends who look to be in their forties. "She is so tiny!" says one of the women, dressed in a leopard-print blouse and cowboy boots. "My God, did you see her shoes?" says another, who has her nails manicured in black. "God, I love her," says the third, wearing leopard-print shoes that match her friend's blouse. "And who is he again?"

Live's conceit has always been one of a pretend husband and wife who, every morning, chat about their lives and the day's news over coffee; later, their neighbors (the celebrities) stop by. In November 2011, the show's original patriarch, Regis Philbin, retired at age 80. "Reeg," as Ripa and his peers call him, represented a bygone era of showbiz, not so much because of his age, but because of his on-air personality, which was often barky and self-congratulatory. For years, Ripa dutifully tempered and bolstered him, setting up his meandering stories and rescuing him every time that it was clear he'd never heard of the young actress sitting next to him. Philbin, host of the show since 1983, had had a number of "wives" over the years—Cyndy Garvey, Ann Abernathy, Kathie Lee Gifford—and critics wondered if sunny sidekick Ripa had the talent or the clout to take the lead role.

After Philbin departed, the renamed Live With Kelly became a sort of rom-com reality show, with Ripa "dating" a series of bachelors, one of whom would become her on-air husband. A month after Ripa took over, its viewership was up 12 percent overall, The New York Times reported, and 14 percent among its target audience of women ages 25 to 54. That Strahan, a broadcasting neophyte, was perhaps an unlikely choice for the job—he beat out Seth Meyers, who was very funny; Pat Kiernan, who was very likable; and Nick Lachey, who was very B-list celebrity—seemed beside the point. What the ratings seemed to prove was that Ripa could carry the show not only as well as Philbin but possibly better.

When I meet Ripa in her dressing room after she's been dragged through the obstacle course on Strahan's back (they lost), it's as if she'd spent the hour since we met processing our encounter. "You know, you look like you should be on Girls," she says, referring to Lena Dunham's show about young women in New York. "When I first saw you, I thought, Oh my gosh, is she on Girls? My friends and I are obsessed with it. To us, it's something that feels so recent, but that was 25 years ago!"

Ripa, who grew up in Stratford, New Jersey, and was a high school cheerleader, moved to New York City at 19. Her father was a bus driver turned labor-union executive, her mother a homemaker who objected to her daughter's acting ambitions. "She worried that I'd either get my heart broken or live under a bridge," Ripa says. In fact, she found work at a Manhattan toy store as a demo girl for Nerf footballs and moved into a studio apartment with the demo girl for Mattel. Soon Ripa landed the role that would make her famous with daytime-TV fans: Hayley, on All My Children. She has a souvenir from that time, a discolored ankle tattoo that she got while on an AMC autograph-signing trip at a Texas mall; it looks like it may have once been a flower. "I call it the symbol of my stupidity," she says when I ask about it.

Having also grown up in New Jersey, I point out that it's hard to get out of the state without some kind of branding. "At least you don't have a tramp stamp," I add.

Ripa looks at me for a few seconds as if trying to make a decision. "Uh, yeah," she says. "I have one of those, too."

After apologizing for several minutes, I ask her what the tattoo is of, but she'd "rather not say." She does, however, tell me that she got it on her wedding night—a true tramp stamp it is not.

Ripa has been married to Mark Consuelos, her former AMC costar, for 16 years. Though publicly she's kept her maiden name, three years ago she had Consuelos tattooed across her wrist. "I thought she was the coolest, sexiest chick," her husband, who has a recurring role on Fx's American Horror Story, tells me of first meeting Ripa. "She smoked back then, and obviously I don't think smoking is cool now, but when you're 24…she was a really, really sexy smoker." After dating for a year, the couple eloped to Las Vegas; they had their firstborn, Michael, a year later.

Ripa was only 30 when she was asked to try out for the chair vacated in 2000 by Kathie Lee Gifford, for whom she'd filled in a few times. "Kelly had this great chemistry with Regis where there was a little flirtation, and they just obviously amused each other," Gelman recalls. "I thought, Well, we need to have this young lady back." In his autobiography, How I Got This Way, Philbin writes, "Hers was a natural, quick-witted, unaffected, confident, fun-loving kind of sparkle that both Gelman and I remembered very well."

On Ripa's first day of auditioning, the show's guests included a psychic who announced on air that she believed Ripa to be pregnant with her second child. Visibly rattled, Ripa replied, "I haven't told my boss yet!" She got the job anyway, beating out Bernadette Peters, Valerie Bertinelli, and Jane Krakowski.

The previous year had been a difficult one for Ripa. In 1999, her younger sister, Linda, an aspiring actress and model—and eight months pregnant at the time—was in a car accident that left her with a fractured pelvis, sternum, and ankle, resulting in a long and difficult recovery. (Linda has since become a children's book author.) And now Ripa, who'd kept her role on All My Children, had a very public second job, for which she wasn't exactly winning critical acclaim. A New York Times headline about her appointment read "A Sidekick Who Is Not Too Much Anything but Pleasant."

"I think at that point pleasant would have been a comfort, because some of what was written was so cruel," Ripa says. She developed what she calls "post-traumatic talk-show disorder, where I would not sleep and stayed up thinking about the show. I really just wanted to do a good job, and I was nervous."

As it turned out, she had no reason to be. In her first months, the younger audience jumped by 80 percent as viewers tuned in to hear the young mother expound on the indignities of pregnancy—and watch her stomach expand day by day.

During the first 20 minutes of every program, the hosts tell personal stories, and as Ripa's family continued to grow (in addition to Mark, the cast includes Michael, now 15, Lola, 11, and Joaquin, 9), so did her popularity. What seemed to resonate with viewers was the way Ripa, a successful New York woman, turned the quotidian moments of marriage and child rearing into dramatic, humorous anecdotes; every nosebleed, every report card, every failed attempt at cooking became a point of camaraderie. For many women, family is often at odds with a career, but Ripa's arguably has been a factor in her success. "I feel like I have a friendship with my audience," she says, "like we know each other, not on a level of talking head and viewers, but like, 'My kid has the flu. So does yours? Oh my God, yours does too?' "

Ripa's marriage is another realm of her life that feels conventional and yet not. On the one hand, she and Consuelos are famous, tremendously attractive people who have dinner with Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld. On the other, they're a couple trying to find the proverbial balance between career and family, with only a part-time nanny. And, they've stayed married longer than not just the average celebrities—Ripa recaps their scheduled date nights on the show—but the average couple. "They're still really hot for each other, and I mean—they are hot for each other," says Bravo's Cohen, a close friend. "They're…doing it all the time. I love that in a couple." Though Ripa is the more famous spouse, at home their roles are fairly traditional. "I actually call [Mark] Desi, because the thing about Desi was that as much attention as Lucy got, Desi was always in charge."

When I ask Consuelos about this, he's at first diplomatic. "We're superpartners in crime, my wife and I, but I think we're pretty…we're pretty…"—and here, he gives up—"Okay, fine. If I were back in the 1950s, I'd be perfectly happy." Ripa: "I was drawn to Mark because he was positively an alpha male, and I didn't think I would be drawn to that. But I just worship him. He makes me feel very safe."

To attribute Ripa's popularity to her domesticity, however, is to overlook her talents as an entertainer. Staying relevant is a perpetual challenge. Ask Katie Couric, whose triumphal tenure at Today was followed by a much-maligned stint on the CBS Evening News and whose new daytime talk show debuted to high ratings that have since fallen. Ripa, with her combination of high-low charm and tenacity has, at least so far, proven to have longevity. "When she came to us, she was a funny soap actress with a great personality," Gelman says. "But over the years she's become a really terrific broadcaster."

Last June, the show won its first daytime Emmy, and, according to the latest ratings, its current 3.3 million viewers give it a lead of about a half million over the same hour of Today. Though Strahan is considerably younger than Philbin, Ripa's job description seemingly isn't changing much. When Twilight star Kristen Stewart, known for her grungy clothing style, visited Live, Strahan asked her if her closet was full of extravagant red-carpet dresses. Before Stewart could respond, Ripa intervened. "He's never met you before," she told Stewart, lovingly pressing her cohost's forearm.

I ask Ripa if she ever feels a disconnect between the daytime audience she's paid to entertain and her life in New York.

"No, no," she says. "No matter how much I try to cool myself up, I'm really dorky. I think that's why people get me. I look at you, and you remind me of Jemima Kirke. You came in and you were so effortless, with your black jeans and your black blazer and your turtleneck on and your hair was just, like, perfect, and I know—I know—you didn't have to do anything to get your hair that way, whereas I would have styled my hair for 17 hours and it would still look very much like a Westminster show-dog. No matter how much I try to cool myself up, it's never going to happen for me. But, like, am I dying to be cool? Yes, I'm dying to be."

Around noon, Ripa and I leave the studio, and her driver, Leo, takes us to the Upper West Side location of SoulCycle, the spin studio. Ripa has changed into black cycling pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt; her hair is pulled back and her makeup is gone. "Once I leave the building, I can walk out to the street and never be noticed. It's my superpower: I'm invisible. I just look very normal and totally unremarkable."

Ripa's near-compulsive tendency to make self-effacing remarks dates back to when she was an actress on All My Children and received ruthless letters from the show's fans. When the weight she gained during her first pregnancy wasn't written into the script, a viewer wrote her, "Eat a carrot, you fat bastard." Ripa framed the note and hung it up on the wall in her dressing room. "I feel like as long as you take ownership over your own flaws, it doesn't hurt if someone else points them out," she says.

The spin class is punishing, but Ripa seems to outperform the twentysomethings manically pedaling around her and emerges looking almost like she did when she arrived. "It's the Botox," she says, adding that she sometimes gets it in her armpits to avoid sweating. Ripa hasn't had plastic surgery, but she's open about the occasional injection. "Every seven months or so my eyelid skin rests on my eyelashes. So I feel like it makes my makeup artist's life easier, and it makes my eyes look a little more open on TV, which is where I happen to work right now."

Though Ripa says she could do the show "forever," she'd also like to produce more. With Consuelos, she founded a production company that, in addition to scripted projects, has developed a number of reality shows, including Cheer on CMT, about cheerleading competitions, and Dirty Soap on E!, about the lives of soap actors. "I've never really planned my career, and it's led me to where I am now," Ripa tells me later by phone. "I also enjoy writing, but will it lead to anything? I don't know. I'm probably not very good, but lack of talent hasn't stopped me before."